"Ready or Not": review

[NB:  major spoilers.]

Elevator pitch:  "Rosemary's Baby" meets "The Most Dangerous Game."  What if Rainsford, instead of being a trained survivalist trapped on an island and facing off against a tough Russian general and his minions, were instead a young, untrained woman trapped in a mansion full of Satanists whose motivation for killing her was their own survival?  That's roughly the premise—and a rather confused one at that—of "Ready or Not," a 2019 horror-comedy directed by Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett.  The movie takes place entirely on the posh estate of the super-rich Le Domas family (with the surname pronounced the Anglo way, i.e., "luh doh-MAHSS," not Gallically as "luh doh-MAH").

As the story begins, Grace (Samara Weaving, niece of Hugo) is about to marry Alex Le Domas (Mark O'Brien), heir to the Le Domas fortune.  The Le Domas family owes its phenomenal success in fields like board games and sports teams to a chance encounter between the great-grandfather of Tony Le Domas (Henry Czerny) and a certain Mr. Le Bail; the encounter resulted in a deal:  eternal success for the Le Domas family as long as a certain ritual is performed every time the family acquires a new member.  Grace belatedly finds out about this ritual after she and Alex get married on the estate's land:  at midnight of the wedding night, Grace must participate in a game.  Which game she plays will be randomly determined.  Alex assures her that she needn't win the game; she merely has to play.  When the time comes to select the game, patriarch Tony tells the full story of the Le Domas/Le Bail deal; an ominous-looking black box is brought out, a blank playing card is inserted into it, and then Grace must pluck the card out.  When she does, the card now has writing on it:  "Hide and Seek."  Grace is given to the count of one hundred, at which point the Le Domas family members will spread out throughout the mansion and try to find her.

What Grace doesn't know is that the Le Domas family is now participating in a satanic ritual ("Le Bail" is an anagram for "Belial," one of the many names for the Devil).  The family members, armed with archaic weapons ranging from crossbows to derringers to poleaxes, are now out to find Grace and, ideally, maim her:  she must be alive for the second phase of the ritual, which must be completed before dawn.

It should be noted, at this point, that the Le Domas family is not of one mind about this ritual, which only occurs when a new person is being brought into the family.  The last time the ritual was performed was thirty years prior, back when Grace's husband Alex was just a scared little boy, frightened by the ritual and protected by his older brother Daniel (Adam Brody).  Now that both brothers are adults, Alex has drifted away from the family, and Daniel—married to a shrewish wife—has become bitterly cynical about the patrician lifestyle in general and his own family's ghoulish quirks in particular.  For his part, Alex does what he can to get Grace out of her predicament.  He apologizes to her for not having been completely honest about the deadly ritual, and he excuses himself by saying that, had he told her about the ritual in advance, she would have left him.  Daniel, meanwhile, is deeply unhappy in his marriage, and during certain quiet moments, he professes a desire to do what Alex did and leave, all while admitting he's too weak to do so.  Daniel also has his doubts as to whether the threat that underlies the failure to complete the ritual is real:  according to family tradition, the entire family will die if the ritual is not completed properly.

Grace survives the first few attempts on her life more by luck than anything else.  Family members accidentally kill some maids as well as other family members; everyone is klutzy with his or her archaic weapon.  Emilie (Melanie Scrofano), Alex's sister and a hopped-up coke addict who is also the mother of two young boys, is the cause of most of the mayhem, accidentally killing two people right off the bat with her derringer.  Tony's ancient, witchy sister Helene (Nicky Guadagni) often has to help Tony clean up Emilie's messes, all while she grouses about the need to respect tradition and complete the ritual before dawn.  (Mr. Le Bail is treated as a living entity; as far as the Le Domas family is concerned, Le Bail remains an active partner in the ancient deal.)

Stevens the butler (John Ralston) proves to be a particularly tenacious hunter; Grace tries shooting him with an elephant gun, only to be told by Stevens that the gun's ammunition is for display only.  Daniel seems to have shifting loyalties, sometimes helping Grace, sometimes aiding his family in capturing her.  One of the movie's central mysteries is whose loyalties lie where.  For the older generation, the answer is obvious:  both Tony and Helene wish to see the ritual through to its conclusion.  But Tony's wife Becky (Andie McDowell) professes to like Grace, even though Becky too is devoted to the ritual.  Alex seems to be the only person sincerely committed to getting Grace away from the family, but there's still the lingering question of why he allowed Grace to participate in the ritual at all:  if he truly loved Grace, wouldn't he have wanted her to be as far away from his family as possible, even if that meant she would never want to see him again?

Fortunately, the script is smart enough to provide an answer to what was, for me, a lingering moral question.  Alex looks like a nice guy, and he seems sincerely committed to helping Grace escape... but this suddenly changes when Alex realizes Grace—who has been hunted like an animal all night—will never trust him again.  By the end of the story, it's Daniel who proves to be the truly moral brother, and Daniel is killed by his own wife Charity (Elyse Levesque) as he's trying to help Grace leave the estate.  Alex turns out to be the worst betrayer of the lot:  just as his mother Becky had said about him, his desire to be part of the Le Domas family pushes him to grab Grace and yell a summons to the rest of the clan.

By this point, poor Grace has been through hell.  One of Emilie's little boys, Georgie (Liam McDonald), finds Grace hiding in a goat stable and shoots her through the hand.  Grace, later on, manages to rip out a rusty old wrought-iron bar at the edge of the estate, but when she tries to squeeze through the fence's opening, she rips open her back.  When Stevens chases her down in a car, Grace wrestles with him and eventually crashes the car while both are inside it.  Daniel finds her soon after and knocks her out with the butt of his rifle (she has to be alive for the second phase of the ritual, you'll recall).  And at the very end, with Grace recaptured thanks to her husband Alex's final betrayal, she gets stabbed in the shoulder as she twists out of the way of a killing blow during the satanic ritual at which she is to be sacrificed.

Dawn arrives, and Grace is still alive.  Helene rips open the curtains, letting in the morning sun, and everyone expects to burst into flames like vampires because they've failed their end of the bargain with Mr. Le Bail.  But nothing happens... until Helene cries that she won't fail Mr. Le Bail, and when she charges at Grace with her poleaxe to deal the final blow, she suddenly explodes into a bloody, pulpy spray.  Other family members begin to explode, including coked-up Emilie and her two boys (at least one of whom was evil enough to shoot Grace through the hand).  The only one left is Alex, and when he tries to approach Grace, begging her for a new beginning, she tugs off her wedding ring, demands a divorce, and Alex explodes, too.  During a previous scuffle between Grace and Tony in a different part of the mansion, a fire had started, and with all of the Le Domas family now gone, Grace walks out of the burning compound, settles onto the steps, and smokes a cigarette as the police and fire crews arrive.  When one first-responder asks Grace what happened, she utters the final line of the film:  "In-laws."

This movie was wildly entertaining, with Samara Weaving giving an outstanding performance as the increasingly frazzled and feral Grace, but I'm hung up on certain theological questions.  First:  once we realize that the family has made a pact with the Devil, what exactly is the motivation for the family's self-preservation?  They've already sold their souls (the line "sold your soul" is used several times in the film), so they know they're all condemned to hell.  The pact doesn't extend anyone's life; it merely confers financial success on the Le Domases, and while one price of that success is the obligation to perform the ritual, the other (implied) price is to burn in hell forever upon a natural death.  Do you see my confusion?  Whether the Le Domases die in an unnatural explosion of blood and gore, or whether they die naturally of old age, they go to hell either way.  If they've aligned themselves with Satan, I presume this is because they desire an eternity in hell:  this isn't a fate to be feared, but rather to be coveted.  Or could it be that, blinded by selfish desire, they participate in the pact without having thought through the implications of making a deal with Satan?  Famous stories have been written about mortals whose main flaw is a kind of moral stupidity that blinds them to the consequences of their choices.

Second:  Alex is a bit of a puzzle.  One way to interpret his betrayal of Grace near the end of the film is to see him as giving in to his basic nature:  he may have tried to separate himself from his fucked-up family, but in the end, he's a Le Domas in full, just as his mother Becky said he was.  Another way to interpret the film is that Alex sincerely wanted to be with Grace, thereby saving himself from his family's satanic karma, but he had a sudden change of heart at the end.  Personally, I found Alex's eventual betrayal predictable, and that's because I have a normal person's moral compass:  once Alex admitted to Grace that he didn't tell her about the ritual because he didn't want to lose her, he revealed himself to be a selfish person, and possibly even a psychopath:  the prospect of Grace's potential death-by-ritual didn't bother him enough for him to warn her away.  While the script was sufficiently smart to keep reminding us that Alex wasn't a morally upright person, the screenwriting was quite vague as to Alex's true motivations.  Maybe that's a good thing:  maybe the movie was purposely open to interpretation on this point.  But I'm still confused about what made Alex tick.  Why, for example, did he want to get back into the family in the first place?  Could it really be as simple as Becky's analysis of Alex's character, i.e., that the pull of his blood ties was just too strong?

Third:  what if Grace had pulled out a card with the name of a different game on it?  The film strongly implies that "Hide and Seek" is the worst card one can pull; Alex even tells Grace, once the hunt begins, that he honestly didn't think she would end up pulling that card.  But I have to wonder:  if Grace had drawn a card that said "Chess" on it, would the chess game also have led to her ritual sacrifice?  This question is never explored in the movie, and I find that frustrating.  What, exactly, made "Hide and Seek" the worst card to pull?

Those bothersome questions aside, "Ready or Not" functions well as a horror-comedy.  The various deaths are often rather gruesome, and poor Grace gets a nasty moment involving a large nail and the wide, empty bullet wound in her hand (she rips her back open not long after that... it's a wonder she didn't die of shock and/or blood loss, not to mention sepsis from her various wounds as the hours of the hunt dragged on), although once again, I have to say that that moment, too, was predictable.  One gag involved literal gagging:  a maid gets an arrow through the mouth and out the back of her head; she keels over, and every time the old crone Helene tries to talk strategy, the maid's dying gasps and gargles keep interrupting the old woman until Helene, exasperated, rushes over to the body and lops the maid's head off with her axe.  Son-in-law Fitch (Kristian Bruun) is given an old crossbow as his weapon for the hunt; he steals away to a bathroom to watch a YouTube video on how to use crossbows.  When the body count starts to rise, the remaining family members find it increasingly difficult to figure out what to do with the corpses.

Comparisons with films like "The Hunt" and "Deliverance" come to mind.  Viewed through a political lens, "Deliverance" could be seen as one liberal nightmare:  being captured and ass-raped by semi-retarded mountain yokels.  "Ready or Not" represents the other extreme on the liberal-nightmare spectrum:  instead of poor hillbillies, it's rich, corporatist Satanists who want to strap you onto a pentagram-inscribed table and sacrifice you to Belial.  I suppose, then, that it's good to see all the evil folks get their comeuppance in "Ready or Not."

It was tempting to read some sort of theological/religious significance into Grace's name, as if she really did represent, say,  Alex's salvation from this evil family.  But in the end, Alex proved to be as satanic as the rest of them, and Grace herself was certainly no Christ figure:  while she generally avoided killing people, she did bludgeon Becky—Alex's mother—to death with Mr. Le Bail's black, ominous-looking card box.  This was in self-defense because Becky had attacked first, but it's undeniable that Grace was venting all of her atavistic fury at Becky in that moment.  (Maybe it was the sight of his mother's mutilated face, when he saw her corpse, that sent Alex over the edge...?)

All in all, despite my pressing questions, I found "Ready or Not" highly entertaining.  I'm going to watch it again and see whether I can figure out certain theological points and character motivations.  The film was beautifully shot, well paced, and generally well acted (although Henry Czerny as Tony Le Domas sometimes seemed to be channeling a manic, over-emoting William Shatner).  Samara Weaving, who looks way too much like fellow Aussie Margot Robbie, may have distinguished herself, here, with her acting.  She conveyed poor Grace's plight convincingly, all while sporting a perfect American accent.  Nicky Guadagni, as the witchy Helene, radiated ancient malice while also playing her role for laughs.  Melanie Scrofano, as the manic, coke-addled Emilie, was laugh-out-loud hilarious.  "Ready or Not" is a well-made, fun, and somewhat gross movie.  Mind you, this is a black comedy, not a light-hearted romp in the Hamptons, so there's plenty of shadowy, sinister subtext as well.

Before I finish, though, I have to wonder about Daniel.  Daniel, you'll recall, is Alex's cynical older brother.  By his own admission, he had stayed with his wicked family because of a lack of courage, and in the end, his own wife shot him in the neck while he was trying to help Grace escape.  Do you think Daniel went to heaven, or did the Devil claim his soul because he had chosen to remain in the family, and therefore remain inside the unholy pact?  I'd like to think that Daniel's final act redeemed him, but it's never clear how these things work.  If someone like Hitler can accept Jesus Christ as his lord and savior right before he dies, thus assuring himself a place among the clouds, and if a holy man can end up in hell right after seeing a gorgeous naked woman and thinking a lustful thought before dying, then maybe Daniel has a chance at reaching the Pearly Gates.  Or, if the afterlife is more like the Egyptian vision of it—in which your heart is weighed against a feather—perhaps the karmic weight of Daniel's many sins would be enough to doom him forever.  Food for thought, eh?

Margot Robbie and Samara Weaving—interchangeable Aussies?